Saturday, December 03, 2005

I actually have been knitting...

I know it seems like it's been a long time since I was doing any knitting. I mean, I've admited already that I'm not knitting anything for Christmas presents this year, and my last post was in October! But I finally have photos to show! Hooray! Bear with me...this is going to be a bit of a long post. Maybe I should split it up and write it over several days so it looks like I've been doing lots. HA HA!!

Let's back up a little bit...so I signed up for that baby sweater knitting course and needed to pick up my materials for it. So, Elaine and I headed to Lettuce Knit. In addition to the stuff I needed for the course (which I'll show a little later), we found these bags of merino ends or rovings, or whatever they call them. They were packaged by weight. And of course we couldn't resist getting some. The whole bag was only $40. It's a sport weight (I think...I'm so bad with the weights), and Elaine and I swapped some our colours. So, here's what I got in the bag.Now to come up with a project for it....any ideas?

So, the baby sweater class started this week. It's only a 2 week class because the sweater is pretty tiny. I actually finished my homework the day after the class since I was practically done after the 2 hours in the store. So, here's a picture of the pattern.(Sorry...too lazy to rotate the pic)It's knit pretty much in one piece in the round starting from the neck down. It's got raglan sleeves too, which I happen to like. The idea that I don't have to seam anything is SOOOO appealing.So, that's what I've got so far and you can see what other colours I picked. I wanted to do a stripped sweater. The part that I've stopped at is where we split things to make the sleeves. I think I'm going to want to switch colors here otherwise it'll be a pain to keep track of how many rows of blue I need on each sleeve. And I actually didn't know that it was going to be knit neck down when I chose the colour. Not that blue is so bad, but I originally wanted to put it on the bottom. In retrospect, I probably should have chosen a variagated yarn instead of trying stripes because there's so much blue now that the next stripe will probably take up, like, the rest of the sweater if I want to keep the stripe the same width. Or maybe I'll frog some of what I've done and re-do it in another colour...I dunno. Maybe I'll go back to the store for some advice, but I don't know if I'll be able to before the next class on Thursday.

Lastly (yup...told you this was a long post), I finished my first felted project! I made a toy mouse with the pattern and yarn that Carolyn and Elaine gave me. Felting is really fun! I was kinda scared at first, and got even more worried when nothing seemed to be happening. But the results were pretty good.The funny thing about the 'face' is that you have to sew the eyes on before you felt, so after I felted it, the shape of the eye changed shape. So, I stuffed it with some scrap yarn and a little catnip and let the cats have it.I think the toys are going to go over pretty well...or maybe it's the catnip!